SAINT-QUENTIN-EN-YVELINES, France: Perhaps one way to measure when golf has truly arrived as an Olympic sport is when players stopped getting asked how a gold medal would stack up against winning a major.
No one is entirely sure, including the one player at Le Golf National who would know.
“That’s a great question for Xander Schauffele since he’s the only man recently to have done both,” said Jon Rahm, a two-time major champion from Spain playing in his first Olympics.
“It’s a good question, but it’s tricky,” Schauffele said.
He won the gold medal in the Tokyo Games, at the time the pinnacle of his young career and extra meaningful because of his family. His father, Stefan, was invited to take part in Germany’s decathlon training and was hit by a drunken driver on the way there, losing an eye.
Schauffele now has two very important silver trophies to go with that gold medal — the Wanamaker Trophy from winning the PGA Championship in May, the claret jug from his British Open title two weeks ago.
“Golf was in the Olympics, and then it was out of the Olympics,” Schauffele said. “So I think a lot of the kids were watching Tiger — or if you’re a little older, you were watching Jack or Arnie, the older legends of the game. You’re watching them win majors.
“For me, it’s very personal,” he said. “The relationship my dad and I have with golf, a lot of it surrounds his teachings of when he was trying to be an Olympian. Then the majors are what I grew up watching. They are two very different things to me.”
Schauffele also said, “The gold medal, it’s been marinating nicely.”
The general consensus is to give it time. The men’s competition starts Thursday on sunbaked Le Golf National, site of the French Open and more famously the 2018 Ryder Cup. It’s the third Olympic golf competition since the sport was put back on the program in Rio de Janeiro.
One little known fact: Paris is the only host city to stage two Olympic golf competitions.
The first gold medal in golf went to Charles Sands in the 1900 Olympics, and odds are he didn’t care all that much. Sands also competed in tennis, his primary sport, in those Paris Games without reaching the medal rounds. He beat 12 amateurs in golf, a sport he had taken up just five years earlier at St. Andrews Golf Club in New York.
Golf was on the Olympic program for the St. Louis Games in 1904, and then it was gone until being resurrected in 2016.
Justin Rose and Inbee Park won in Rio. Schauffele and Nelly Korda won in Tokyo. Gold medalists in golf have not lacked for star power, just meaning.
“I think as golf is in the Olympics for a longer period of time ... I don’t know if anything will be able to sit alongside the majors. We have our four events a year that are the gold standard,” Rory McIlroy said. “But think this in time is going to be right up there among that.”
Golf is gaining traction, best measured by attendance. The top seven players in the world, starting with Scottie Scheffler and Schauffele at Nos. 1 and 2, are part of the 60-man field at Le Golf National.
Collin Morikawa and Wyndham Clark, who have three majors between them over the last five years, were at the opening ceremony on Friday and have spent time at other events. It is not lost of them that so many Olympic athletes have worked four years for their biggest moment. Golf gets four big moments a year, plus the Olympics.
For Morikawa, seeing the other athletes compete this week gives him an even deeper appreciation. He was in the seven-man playoff for the bronze in Tokyo. There’s that other small matter of being in the same group with Schauffele at seven tournaments since Tokyo.
“We hear Xander get announced on the tee as the reigning gold medalist. As a major champion, you hear it for a year. But this, you hear it for four. It’s a pretty cool thing to have.”
Scheffler and Schauffele are the leading two favorites — one with a Masters green jacket to go along with six PGA Tour titles this year and the No. 1 ranking, the other a double major winner in 2024.
McIlroy has gone 10 years since winning his fourth major championship. He skirted around the issue by saying a gold medal would be his biggest feat in the last 10 years.
But it also depends on the country. Hideki Matsuyama was under enormous pressure in the Tokyo Games, held in 2021 without spectators because of the COVID-19 pandemic. He also was part of the seven-man playoff for the bronze. Matsuyama was the Masters champion that year.
Green jacket or gold medal?
“I think every single golf fan knows what the green jacket is,” he said. “But the gold medal, I think every single fan in Japan would know what the gold medal is in the Olympics. I think both are important, but I think the gold medal would have a big impact in Japan.”
The home pressure — and support — this year falls to Matthieu Pavon of France. He wants to win a major, just like any golfer. But a week among other Olympians changed his mind.
“I always felt like major for golf is more important because we have not really grown up with the Olympics,” he said. “After a few days in the Olympic Village, the opening ceremony in Paris with all this crowd in front of the Eiffel Tower and all the great moments we spent the last few days, it really feels like a gold medal would be now ranked higher than a major for me.”
